On behalf of our principal, Mazi Chima Matthew Amadi, PhD, The Mazi Organization (TMO) extends a warm welcome to His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR. As always, Imolites will open their arms to visitors-even when their own roads are too broken to drive on.
Mr. President, you are here to commission projects that reveal Governor Hope Uzodimma’s true genius: he has perfected the fine art of building federal roads so that Abuja will refund him, while leaving Imo’s state and local roads looking like war trenches. A brilliant scheme indeed-why fix the arteries of Imo’s economy when you can instead pave the way to the federal treasury?
We “celebrate” the much-talked-about Assumpta Flyover, a quarter-kilometer triumph that took six years to build. Six years for one flyover, while Rivers and Ebonyi states were mass-producing them like pure water. Of course, in Uzodimma’s Imo, one flyover is an epochal achievement-never mind that two kilometers away, Douglas Road and World Bank-Umuguma Road could double as obstacle courses for the World Rally Championship.
We also clap for the Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu International Conference Centre (EIICC). Because what Imo people desperately needed-amid collapsing rural clinics, starving pensioners, and decaying schools-was a shiny hall to host conferences that no ordinary citizen can afford to attend. Bravo, Governor. When the people cry for bread, you give them banquets for the elite.
Governor Uzodimma’s leadership style is equally commendable: an absentee landlord ruling by proxy. Six years in power, and not once has he visited all 27 LGAs. Perhaps he fears that venturing into the villages would expose him to the potholes, insecurity, and despair that his government pretends do not exist. After all, red carpets are smoother than rural roads.Local government autonomy? Supreme Court rulings? Grassroots democracy? All irrelevant in Uzodimma’s kingdom. Why empower LGAs when you can run them like personal estates? One wonders: where has the torrent of federal allocations gone, since not a single tangible project has sprung up in our LGAs? But of course, in this government, accountability is a foreign language.
Mr. President, we urge you: enjoy the ceremonies, cut the ribbons, but take a detour afterwards. Drive yourself down Umaru Musa Yar’Adua Drive, Owerri-Port Harcourt Road, or Hospital Road. You’ll quickly see that beneath the governor’s showpiece projects lies the real Imo: a state abandoned to craters, insecurity, and suffering.
So today, we wholeheartedly “congratulate” Governor Uzodimma-for proving that in Imo, development is not about serving the people, but about serving the refund pipeline. He is less a governor, more a contractor to the Federal Government. May Abuja keep paying, since Imo surely isn’t gaining.
Welcome, Mr. President. Ignore the painted walls and staged parades. Listen instead to the heartbeat of the people, muffled under dust, mud, and neglect.
Long live the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Long live Imo State.
Long live The Mazi Organization.
Signed
Cajetan Duke, JP
Spokesman, The Mazi Organization